GNOME: Interview with GUADEC Organizer Alejo Pacín

Our second interview comes from another member of the local organizing team Alejo Pacín:

Q: Where do you live and/or work?
Alejo: I live in the best place in the world! Taboada, a small rural municipality in the province of Lugo (about 140 km from A Coruña). Some pictures.

Q: What do you like to do in your free time?
Alejo: In addition to computer engineering, I’m a professional musician (violin, Galician bagpipe, Galician traditional percussion, …). Especially in summer, I play a lot with a Galician traditional group called “Varacuncas”.

The rest of the year, I have typical hobbies, such as mountain biking, cross country running, swimming, basketball, football, gym sports, playing video games, watching movies, reading books and so on. Also not-so-typical hobbies, such as collecting dreamcast and old rare hardware (alpha, sparc, powerpc, x86, …), and finally I have a new hobby: Arduino. I really love it!

But above all this, my biggest hobby is to organize the GPUL events: free software/hardware conferences, workshops on cryptography, privacy and security, multimedia conferences, seminars for novice students and, of course, the GUADEC 2012!

Q: What is your favorite part of A Coruña (and/or the surrounding area)?
Alejo: Hmm, a really complicated question. There are so many… But if I have to choose, I think I prefer the Old City. It has a lot of charming places: Galician traditional taverns, parks, museums and so on.

Q: Why did you want to hold GUADEC in A Coruña?
Alejo: There are a lot of reasons to hold GUADEC in A Coruña:

A lot of GNOME users (the Faculty of Computer Science has more than 2500 students and use GNOME on all its computers) and developers.

A huge local team (more than 400 potential volunteers)

And ,paraphrasing myself: “To be a volunteer at GUADEC is a way to help GNOME to improve the experience of its desktop users”.

Q: Have you attended GUADEC in the past? If so, when/where?
Alejo: No, I have not had that luck. I’m a busy student: no time, no money. But I have attended to some GUADEC-ES edition.

Q: Has organizing GUADEC been fun?
Alejo: Yes, but not at all, obviously. What I liked most were the local team meetings; so funny… xD. But they have many hard and complicated tasks… not so fun. But it’s all for a good cause, so no complaints.

Q: What was the most challenging aspect of organizing GUADEC?
Alejo: Well, I’m on the travel and accommodation team, so I don’t know all aspects. But I think that coordinating so many people (about 220 registrants right now) is the most complicated.

Q: What are you looking forward to most?
Alejo: Well, this is not serious but… the Social Program, of course, :D.

Q: Any other thoughts on GUADEC this year?
Alejo: A lot! But… surprise. MUHAHAHAHA!!!